Elsie May Kimball was born on July 23, 1887 in Bennington, New Hampshire, to Fred H. Kimball (who later became a senator in New York) and Leonetta Nichols Kimball. She attended high school in Milford, New Hampshire, then followed her sister, Lorenia M. Kimball, to Mount Holyoke College in 1905. She left in 1907 to study at the School of Art in Boston until 1910. Between 1910 and 1919 she worked as a gas company demonstrator and home missionary in Boston. From 1919-1921 and 1923-1925 she worked for the Near East Relief (N.E.R.) organization in Armenia and the Republic of Georgia. She cared for orphans and refugees, organized soup kitchens, and worked as a secretary for N.E.R. administrators. In 1926, she began working as a clerk and translator for the Georgian Manganese Company, a mining firm with offices in Tchiatouri (C'iatura), Georgia, and Moscow, Russia. She returned to the United States in 1927, and in 1928 she was awarded a medal for her war relief work. She was Superintendent of Stenographers in the Law Department of Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation in New York City for twenty-one years. On October 8, 1955 she married John E. Beck, a chemist. She died on February 28, 1972 in Mount Vernon, New York at the age of eighty-four.